Northern Ireland has its glorious 12th a month before England, presumably because its shooting season traditionally ran all year around. Ah, tradition. The 12th of July, like so many other local traditions, seems, to me at least, to be in severe decline.

There is now an opportunity to compound popular boredom with Orange antics by permitting their marches. But it won't be enough for Peter Hain to issue a diktat: the permission must come from within the nationalist community itself.

The sole purpose of Orange marches through nationalist areas is to irritate or if possible terrify Catholics - and I use that the Catholic in the expansive, virtually meaningless Northern Irish sense; that is to say, not a unionist - lest we forget the unionists are in charge, you see.

The problem is, they are not in charge any more and haven't been - not properly - since they collapsed the Sunningdale agreement in 1974. Ever since then, the unionist ascendancy has suffered a slow process of attrition. So is it now time to have the parades commission stand down?

Reasons for objecting to the parades commission are threefold: Firstly, as Orangemen are frequently at pains to point out, it's undemocratic. Of course, this argument might carry a little more weight if unionists had ever paid more than lip service to representative democracy. Never mind that the creation of the Northern Irish "state" was an undemocratic stitch-up from day one.

The dishonesty in the Orange position is best exemplified by their description of Orange marches, replete with hundreds of beered-up hangers-on and martial bands with such charming names as the Ulster Volunteer Force Regimental Band, as "walking".

Certainly, Orange marches involve walking. But that is not the totality of their activity. A continuum exists on which walking and Orange marches both sit, but it's a similar continuum to that on which you might find both eating a steak and cannibalism.

Secondly, there is the lofty principle at stake: freedom of assembly. Once the state takes away the rights of the Orange Order to march, it sets a precedent for state interference in other demonstrations, ones to which even Guardian readers may be sympathetic, such as trade union marches or gay pride parades. Again, let's temporarily ignore the fact that many Orangemen would dearly love to "save" Ulster from sodomy and are unlikely candidates for demanding economic democracy.

The large Orange demonstrations that continue in solidly Protestant areas are irrelevant to the spirit of the 12th. The only processions that ever lifted that spirit and exalted the Billy Boys were the ones that brought them as close as they wanted to filling each Fenian heart with fear; marching up and down on the road to Portadown, or wherever else they cared. But there is little enough of that now. They can no longer walk where they care to, nor even where they dare to. Today it's a matter of them walking where they are inoffensive or put up with.

Rarely is such a rational view expressed on Northern Ireland. Certainly not in a place where selective reporting is the order of the day and where Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionists, the two main political parties, can do nothing but sing to the choir, so afraid are they of following the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists into their respective domains of the middle-class hinterland and total oblivion.

Sinn Féin is engaged in such an orgy of heroic victimology - something, incidentally, that the Democratic Unionist party also specialises in - that to concede that Orange marches are more of an irritant than a threat would be anathema to it. The DUP, meanwhile, is such an unmanoeuvrable beast of a personality cult that it cannot ever suggest that compromise is even an option. And what would be the point anyway?

The Orange Order is understandably very interested in tradition and it upholds no tradition more assiduously than the great unionist tradition of refusing to lie down with the croppies, even for a quick chat: "I'm not talkin' to yous about talkin' to yous." And so, dialogue with the various residents' groups is not possible because one of them might be able to pronounce Sinn Féin (and do it with the invisible 'h' in Sinn).

Denying these antediluvians their right to parade about the place plays right into their hands: "We're the victims here, not the aggressors." If the riots in Dublin proved nothing else, they surely proved this. Scarcely had the first paving stone been hurled at this crypto-Orange march when all of Dublin spontaneously erupted into paroxysms of guilt-ridden finger-pointing at phantom northerners, shortly followed by a great gnashing of teeth, wailing of voices, and wringing of hands. And then came the spilling of ink.

In the aftermath, it turned out that the whole affair had led some unwitting Dubliners, I am sorry to report, to pity the Orangemen. One even said to me that Jeffrey Donaldson seemed "a reasonable sort" - proof positive, if ever any was needed, that even when combined, a diet of RTÉ news and the Irish Independent makes for rather thin gruel, on northern matters at least.

And so the march achieved its objective: chaos, confusion and the ex-post facto attribution of blame for everything that ever happened in the north of Ireland firmly in the republican camp, which while far from short of responsibility, is hardly alone in sharing culpability for the sorry state of affairs that is Northern Ireland post-1969, let alone prior to that.

So, this year in the north, let them march: they're nothing but a bloody irrelevance anyway. But more than that, letting them march would be an act of magnanimity that they would despair at.